By D.K. Holm
August 30, 2005
[nota bene: The following column, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know the ending of the movies mentioned, don't read on.]
Garden State
THE CONSTANT GARDENER
Every time John Le Carré publishes a novel, you learn something new about the author.
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His first two books were almost anonymously published, but the grim, gray mid-1960s were ready for a downbeat, "realistic" version of a spy story as a counter option to the popular James Bond books and movies, and THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD filled that need. At that point, we learned that Le Carré was a former member of the British foreign service. A string of international bestsellers followed culminating in the author's masterpiece, TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY, and during which we learned that Carré was a pseudonym. Around the time of TINKER's sequel, THE HONORABLE SCHOOLBOY, word broke out that, yes, just as you suspected, Carré had indeed been a "spy," if only on the very lowest echelon, based in Germany. With THE LITTLE DRUMMER GIRL we learned a little about Carré's sister, and while promoting A PERFECT SPY we learned that Carré's father was a rogue and a scoundrel, in the context of a book that posited that it is beneficial for spies to have something of a criminal background.
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Over the years, especially after the fall of the USSR, Le Carré has also become increasingly outspoken about political issues. I get the impression that during the Cold War years Le Carré was a vaguely liberal cold warrior, disliking the Communists but also wearied by the perpetuation of the standoff by American spies and the ultimate pointlessness of the whole enterprise, since neither side was convincing the other. With that conflict gone Le Carré has settled in for spot checks on troubled areas of the world: the new Russian, global financial shenanigans, the arms trade, central America, and, in THE CONSTANT GARDENER, the socioeconomic impact of practices by international drug cartels. While some have seen Le Carré adrift in the world without the Cold War to form a background for his moral and romantic tales, instead I see him as liberated and able to cast his net wider. His unshacklement from the bonds of the low-grade morally ambiguous Soviet-US conflict has resulted in a string of superb novels that are, though presumably bestsellers, undervalued by critics and readers alike. But thanks to the range of his interests, we now know more about Le Carré than we ever thought we would.
For a guy categorized as a spy novelist, Le Carré hasn't actually written a spy novel in a long time. His recent ABSOLUTE FRIENDS broke a string of mostly non-spy spy novels that, with their synecdoche-influenced titles, aspire to art rather than just popularity. Unfortunately, it is the title of the cinematic adaptation of THE CONSTANT GARDENER that is going to kill this movie. What the hell is it about? The movie adaptation of the novel HOW TO MAKE AN AMERICAN QUILT was killed, despite its cast, when Jay Leno asked Kev the Monday after it opened if he'd seen the movie, and Kevin said he wasn't interested in seeing a movie about a quilt.
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There is in fact a gardener in the film, Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes), a career diplomat whose hobby is gardening. He is one of those modest Le Carré men with a vivid inner life but who are socially awkward if not downright ignored who end up with a vivacious, independent woman who puzzles and intimidates them. In this case it is Tessa (a miscast Rachel Weisz), who becomes an activist against the global drug companies after she sees the effects of their experimentation on the citizens of the African country where Quayle has been posted. When Tessa dies, Quayle abandons his diplomatic career to try and track down her killers and recreate her quest for knowledge.
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THE CONSTANT GARDENER is directed by Fernando Meirelles, hot off the indie and award success of CITY OF GOD. He brings to the film the same style he employed in GOD, a hectic in-the-streets, in-your-face hand held style that invested a documentary realism to that film, and the movie version is unusually faithful to the source novel, except for a late innings action scene and a slightly more upbeat ending.
The best adaptation of a Le Carré novel still remains TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY, and not just because it had the luxury of six hours and a great cast of British actors who felt the material in their bones. Le Carré's novels are interior, dwelling deep in the minds of its central characters and many of the subsidiary ones. TINKER the movie matched this intimacy, putting us cozily into the lives and sensibilities of the characters, even the villains.
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I noticed something curious about Meirelles's otherwise innovative realistic or documentary style approach to Le Carré's book — it's impersonal. The style removes you from the characters. It distances the viewer, evaporating the intimacy you feel reading the books. The documentary style, at least applied to a fiction film, is surprisingly cold and objective. This style is very much at odds with the tone found within Le Carré's books. The great thing about the fiction film, with its huge screen and close ups and supportive, emotional music, is that, at its best, it creates the illusion of profound intimacy with the characters on the screen. It's this quality that has made cinema and makes it remain the most alluring mass art form. Movies are so powerful that they can make you identify or read the thoughts of a dog, like Lassie. It's fascinating to see how some small shifts in the style of a film can render the intimacy null and void.
Thus when another character confesses to Quayle that he also loves Tessa you don't particularly feel anything, except perhaps that British men are uniformally shits. In any case, there is a coldness, or distance to the film belied by the trailer and at odds with the book. It's well acted throughout but not as suspenseful as it could have been and ultimately not as emotionally powerful as it could have been.
Media Notes From All Over
There has been a seismic shift in the attitude towards popular movies since the 1950s. The films that are bombs in Maltin's annual viewing guides, the dreck, the films maudit that used to end up on worst film lists, are now taken seriously by the academy.
The latest evidence of this shift is found in the new book BEATING THE DEVIL: THE MAKING OF NIGHT OF THE DEMON (127 pages, $25 dollars, ISBN 0 9531926 1 X). It's written by Tony Earnshaw, who is the head of film programming at the Bradford, England National Museum of Photography, Film, and Television, which also published the book. It's a nifty if pricey little production history of Jacques Tourneur's last horror film, also known as CURSE OF THE DEMON.
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NIGHT/CURSE, as is well known, is the adaptation of M R James ghost story "Casting the Runes." By the time it got to the screen the film had diverged dramatically from the source, controversially adding a tangible monster for the ethereal thing of vengeance in the story. One thing that the book reminds us of is how long it takes, even back then, for a film to make it to production. Here, Hitchcock collaborator Charles Bennett had begun his script in 1954, and it didn't hit the screen until 1957. By then the project had been waylaid by an American producer, a vulgarian, a child star turned producer, name Hal Chester. The photo of him in the book is delightful, and no doubt chosen because it casts Chester in the worst possible light.
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The book begins with a lengthy list of photo permissions. This is followed by the acknowledgements and a forward by director Alex Cox, whose work bears no obvious connection with NIGHT or its genre. Cox takes the opportunity to decry the British censors. Then there is an introduction by Christopher Frayling, again someone not normally associated with horror. Both Cox and Frayling spoil some of the surprises the book holds about the film's history.
But the throat clearing isn't over. Next comes the author's own preface, and the films cast and credits. You begin to feel like Jack Lemmon waiting for GRAND HOTEL to start in THE APARTMENT.
Finally, on what is technically the book's 32nd page, the production history proper finally commences. But Earnshaw immediately begins talking about DEAD OF NIGHT. I thought there was a higher point to this diversion, that maybe M R James also wrote the stories this film was based on, but no, it seems that Earnshaw raises the specter of DEAD OF NIGHT as the high standard of horror that NIGHT had eventually to match.
Earnshaw then places James and his story in the context of British pop fiction, summarizes Bennett's career and interest in the story, and the screenwriter's battle with the British censors. The story gets interesting when the crude Chester gets involved. Why he was interested in the project is not made explicit, but the script came cheap and Chester could get it. What Chester's intervention guaranteed was that the film would not be an RKO film with Robert Taylor called THE BEWITCHED as it was at first destined to be.
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Though Tourneur is the credited director, there are also contributions from the fascinating figure of Cy Endfield (HELL DRIVERS, MYSTERIOUS ISLAND, ZULU), who sounds British but who was an American who exiled himself to England during the Red Scare. Endfield apparently did some script work and also supposedly shot some of the footage that Tourneur declined to do. Chester had worked with Endfield on other projects and TV shows. The rest of the book tracks the casting, including the then alcoholic Dana Andrews, the special effects, and the film's afterlife. Appendices show contemporary photos of all the locations used in the film, and filmographies and bios (with some rare pix) of most of the people involved in the film.
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The question is this, however. Does NIGHT OF THE DEMON demand this level of attention? Earnshaw makes great claims for the movie, calling it "one of the most important films of its type" and the last great British horror film. Unfortunately, NIGHT isn't very scary and kind of screws up its premise (earlier drafts by Bennett sound as if they might have made a more effective film). Earnshaw defends the inclusion of the monster, contrary to most commentary on the film, but there is a larger problem with the project, that is, that it has been Americanized, not just with Andrews, but with a more dynamic, aggressive narrative style. This sets the film quite apart from DEAD OF NIGHT which Earnshaw heralds at the books beginning.
Nevertheless I found the book fascinating to read. The author has unearthed numerous interesting buts of trivial about the film's history and tracks its progress through the censorship board with extraordinary detail. Does the film demand this level of attention? I vote yes, that every movie can generate an equally fascinating book about its production and meditations on its meaning, implications, and the lessons its making teaches.
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Coincidentally, but also tangentially, SAHARA (Paramount, 2005, $29.95, Tuesday, August 16, 2005; also in a full frame version and UMD), is another recent movie taking on the subject of global health. Also based on a pop fiction novel (at least as Le Carré and Clive Cussler are categorized in stores), SAHARA was monstrously more successful than THE CONSTANT GARDENER is likely to be because instead of bumming out the viewer Breck Eisner's film (presumably like the book, which I haven't read) flatters his summer movie prejudices. SAHARA is just as "caring" as Le Carré's film, but still feels the need to comply with modern blockbuster conventions.
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Eisner, son of former Disney chief Michael Eisner (who, coincidentally [?] got his movie start at Paramount), is a textbook example of the modern asexual thriller. He's like Michael Bay 2.0, the new lighter, tighter, leaner, and cheaper Michael Bay, with conventionally solid material (though an uneven cast). Or Bay lite. Or Bay minus. In fact, there hasn't been as lean or uncomplicated and derivative a thriller since ... Disney's NATIONAL TREASURE !
Here are some of the cultural hits I got off SAHARA after a couple of viewings. I felt citations of THE CRIMSON PIRATE (the chained walk under the truck bed), APOCALYPSE NOW (the trip up river), THE FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX (the ad hoc wind car), and RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (the fight under the hovering helicopter). There is even a bit of the Bond score, an arc of horn notes, in Clint Mansell's music.
Eisner is 35-years-old and so lived through and presumably might remember such things as punk rock, disco, the films of Martin Scorsese and Tim Burton; but instead his movie is as square as the first films of Steven Spielberg. Far from the inventive, wide-ranging and mood evoking compilations on Scorsese's soundtracks, on his soundtrack Eisner and his advisors offer "Magic Carpet Ride," "American Band," and "xx, tunes existent long before the full achievement of human consciousness, and often ladled on with little relation to the action except for maybe a partial phrase.
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Which isn't to say that the film is all bad. There is a quite nice credit sequence (which promises more than any movie could deliver), which must be set in the Bill Macy character's quarters, due to the still-smoldering cigar. And we are first introduced to Dirk Pitt (dreadful name) in a nifty sequence shot presented oneirically from the POV of damsel in distress Eva Rojas (Penelope Cruz), a WHO doc trying to track down the source of a plague. McConaughey is engaging, and Macy is quite good in an unusual part for him. I've never gotten the appeal of Penelope Cruz, however. She strikes me as one of those uninteresting transsexuals that her mentor Almodovar so prankishly marbles into his films.
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The widescreen image is sharp, and the audio options are DD English 5.1 Surround, and English and French 2.0 Surround with subtitles in English and Spanish. The supplements are quite good, requiring for their enjoyment only that you actually like the movie. There is a solo commentary by Eisner, and a second in which he is joined by McConaughey, who also served as exec producer on the film. There are three making ofs, "Across The Sands Of Sahara," "Visualizing Sahara," and the cast and crew wrap party.
There are four deleted scenes, including "Kitty Mannock's Crash," "Finding Kitty Mannock's Plane," "The Long Kiss," and "Oceanographers Dying In The Desert" all with optional commentary by Eisner and McConaughey: On with a Play All option, and trailers for current and forthcoming Paramount product. The animated, musical menu offers 17-chapter scene selection.
And incidentally, if you are interested in KILL BILL, you might find my new book, KILL BILL: AN UNOFFICIAL CASEBOOK useful. It is now available in fine bookstores everywhere, or from Amazon.
Not only that, I've got a new book coming out in October (fingers crossed) on an aspect of film noir I call film soleil, titled simply FILM SOLEIL. It is sure to alter film criticism as we know it to its very core. Order it now!
And if you are interested in what I sound like, I can be heard on KBOO radio (90.7 FM) the second and the fourth Wednesday of the month, at 9 AM in the morning (Pacific Standard Time) on Ed Goldberg's show MOVIE TALK along with Dawn Taylor. It's available via streaming audio (in 20 Kbps Stereo). The next broadcast is Wednesday, August 24th, at 9 AM.
COMING SOON:DEAD AND BREAKFAST, RED EYE, COWARDS BEND THE KNEE, MY SUMMER OF LOVE, REMINGTON STEEL and other TV mystery shows, many STAR TREKS, and more!
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